*sigh* Ok. I've decided upon the jquery.history_remote.js plugin by Klaus. I have it working, except there is one slight problem, and I can't figure out how to fix it.
I have a table of links that, when you click on a link, they pull up more detailed data, load it into a div, so on and so forth as I've described earlier. I've changed the href to be #detailed_info<some number>. I made the call to initialize, giving it a call back function that will show the original div you see and hide the div(s) with the detailed info, as I'd like it to. The problem is that the data you get from clicking on the link with the #detailed_info href is an ajax call. And it appears that when I enable ajaxHistory that all the links now make two ajax requests instead of one! I can stop it from doing this by making a preventDefault call on the event, but then it doesn't get added to the history. If I completely remove the history stuff, the links only make one ajax call, and the data is only retrieved once as I expect, but then now the back link doesn't work as I need it. I'm about ready to rip my hair out... does anyone have any suggestions?